Jagathon’s 20th anniversary event to be hosted virtually

Jagathon, IUPUI’s annual tradition of a fundraising event for Riley Children’s Hospital, will be hosted completely online this year amid the pandemic.

To compensate for the lack of in-person engagement, the event has been extended from it’s typical 15-hour format to take place over three consecutive days. The event will start on April 23 at 7 p.m. EST to April 25 at 2 p.m. EST. 

“It’s not 72 hours of straight live content,” Senior and Vice President of Membership Raven Brzeszkiewicz said. “It looks very different in that aspect, you know we’re not all in a room together, obviously, but we’ll still have a lot of our same things we would do in a normal year.”

The event will consist of several pre-recorded activities and also some livestreamed content via Twitch. Each person who registers for the event will receive a participant engagement guide so they can see all the activities, when they will take place and how to access them.

Many of Jagathon’s staple activities will still be part of the event in the virtual format. Participants will still learn the morale dance with part of the learning done live and while other parts are pre-recorded. Color wars, where participants are assigned a color team to fundraise with and compete against the other teams to see who can fundraise the most, will still be taking place as well.

There will also be a fitness activity like there has been each year previously, this year with Naptown Fitness they will be doing Yoga from home, The Riley Talent Show will still take place giving Riley Kids and opportunity to be on center stage and for their families to tell their stories, and both Chancellor Paydar and Mayor Hogsett will speak at the event.

Participants are still encouraged to continue to fundraise from home. There will continue to be incentives for participants to reach fundraising goals during the event. 

“We have participant incentives, which is something really big that we always have,” Brzeszkiewicz said. “Based on how much a participant fundraises we’ll send them different incentives in the mail. So we’ll ship them to them after the event so they can receive the incentives they earned.”

Those who fundraise $50 will receive Jagathon stickers, those who fundraise $100 and/or complete all Journey to Jagathon Steps receive an event shirt for free and Jagathon bracelets, those who fundraise $250 receive a color-changing cup, those who fundraise $500 receive a car decal and those who fundraise $750 receive a Children’s Miracle Network Pin. In addition, anyone who fundraises $500 between April 10th through the end of the event will receive a new wireless JBL speaker.

The Donor Drive is the main fundraising page for Jagathon and all the links to the activities and streams will be accessible from that page. Opposed to previous years, there is no registration fee for the event. Register for the event at the link below and be sure to check back in to the Donor Drive for updates about the event. https://events.dancemarathon.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=register.start&eventID=4001